There is wealth beneath the waves.

Assessing climate change impacts on Pacific marine ecosystems through international collaboration

Dr Tom Okey from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research is using his Pew Fellowship to advance the science of marine and coastal climate impacts and to seek management and policy solutions.

• 21 February 2007 | Updated 14 October 2011

• What we know 
• Addressing the issues 
• Location
• The research involved 

What we know

Changes to the oceans are expected to cause community-level shifts that will ultimately affect ecosystem function and cause major changes in the services provided by ocean ecosystems to humans.

Compounding this problem are fisheries and pollution.

These otherwise manageable stressors may act synergistically with climate change to damage ecosystems.

To prevent the looming crisis posed by this combination of stressors, Dr Okey believes that a new integrated, coordinated and immediate approach to policy-making is needed.

Addressing the issues

The goal of the analysis is to aid in the development of more comprehensive and complementary science programs and innovative ideas for climate change impact assessment, management, and communication.

Dr Okey also will conduct an assessment of current knowledge of climate change impacts and develop marine ecological indicators of climate change impacts for use in long-term monitoring programs and strategic development of long-term ecological research.

Finally, the collaboration will seek progress in integrating global climate models with whole marine ecosystem trophodynamic models.

Location

Due to the extent of oceanographic and biological changes that have been observed  and because of their ecological and political similarities and contrasts, the work will focus on:

• the north-east Pacific Ocean, along the West coast of North America (the California and Alaska Currents) and
• the south-west Pacific Ocean adjacent to the East coast of Australia (including the Coral Sea and the Tasman Sea).

The research involved

Dr Okey’s project will advance the integration of global climate models with ecosystem models such as whole food web trophodynamic models that also incorporate broad ecosystem impacts of fisheries.

He expects to use the results to identify and prioritise a suite of management strategies to deal with possible climate change impacts on north-east and south-west Pacific Ocean ecosystems.

He believes that such a result can be accomplished by a carefully-assembled and tasked working group with up-to-date knowledge of climate change impacts.

Find out more about Dr Tom Okey, Senior Quantitative Marine Ecologist.